U22A-02
Development of a GNSS-Enhanced Tsunami Early Warning System
Tuesday, 15 December 2015: 10:35
102 (Moscone South)
Gerald W Bawden, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, United States, Timothy Ian Melbourne, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, United States, Yehuda Bock, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States, Yuhe T Song, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States and Attila Komjathy, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States
Abstract:
The past decade has witnessed a terrible loss of life and economic disruption caused by large earthquakes and resultant tsunamis impacting coastal communities and infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific region. NASA has funded the early development of a prototype real-time Global Navigation Satellite System (RT-GNSS) based rapid earthquake and tsunami early warning (GNSS-TEW) system that may be used to enhance seismic tsunami early warning systems for large earthquakes. This prototype GNSS-TEW system geodetically estimates fault parameters (earthquake magnitude, location, strike, dip, and slip magnitude/direction on a gridded fault plane both along strike and at depth) and tsunami source parameters (seafloor displacement, tsunami energy scale, and 3D tsunami initials) within minutes after the mainshock based on dynamic numerical inversions/regressions of the real-time measured displacements within a spatially distributed real-time GNSS network(s) spanning the epicentral region. It is also possible to measure fluctuations in the ionosphere’s total electron content (TEC) in the RT-GNSS data caused by the pressure wave from the tsunami. This TEC approach can detect if a tsunami has been triggered by an earthquake, track its waves as they propagate through the oceanic basins, and provide upwards of 45 minutes early warning. These combined real-time geodetic approaches will very quickly address a number of important questions in the immediate minutes following a major earthquake: How big was the earthquake and what are its fault parameters? Could the earthquake have produced a tsunami and was a tsunami generated?
